


Coyote Son

by rightsidethru



Series: Secret Santa/Holiday Exchanges 2017 [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Sentinels & Guides, Bucky Barnes Feels, Canon Divergence - Avengers: Infinity War (Movie), Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War, Post-Canon, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Protective Bucky Barnes, Tony Stark Feels, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, WinterIron Holiday Exchange 2017, Winteriron Holiday Exchange, Wordcount: 5.000-10.000, winteriron
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-26
Updated: 2017-12-26
Packaged: 2019-02-16 12:07:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13053666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rightsidethru/pseuds/rightsidethru
Summary: The battle against Thanos had unexpected consequences for Tony Stark:His body was changing, senses going sharper, and it was becoming more and more difficult to find his way out of a "zone."The most unlikely of people ended up being the cornerstone necessary to keep Tony himself afloat:James Buchanan Barnes.





	Coyote Son

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DreamcatchersDaughter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DreamcatchersDaughter/gifts).



> One of the requests I was given was for a Sentinel and Guide AU. I've never written for that particular fandom/theme and I decided to give it a try. DreamcatchersDaughter, I hope that you enjoy your WinterIron Holiday Exchange gift! :)
> 
> *
> 
> Kudos and comments are welcomed and appreciated! <3

_Dislocated_  
_Self is fading_  
_Falling back from what I was_  
_Flying through existence_  
_Tumbling towards a burning sun_  
_Something screaming in the distance_  
_Telling me to come_  
_**It's calling me**_  
[“Into the Unknown”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXo0Bqp5O9I) – Starset

++

There was a break within the Avengers long before Thanos had finally managed to come to Earth. The division between the two teams—two teams that _should_ have been one—was clear for any to see, no matter how perfect a media smile the members were able to put on for the general public. It was that division, that glacial-wide crack that ensured that Tony was unwilling and unable to turn his back on his one-time teammates: it was the exact same reason why he couldn’t bring himself to trust that they would have him covered whenever he moved in for close-range combat with Thanos and his army and the generals that oversaw it all. One eye was always facing forward, ready to meet the latest challenge… the other, however, was constantly glancing over his shoulder, wary and waiting for the blade to bury itself in his back, next to his spine.

It was this inattention that ended up costing Tony:

Steve had come up on his four, movements too fast, and the brunette _remembered_ how the other man darted in and attacked, the solid connection of hits against his own armor—the deeply biting chill of a perpetually wintertime Siberia; it caught the inventor off-guard in the worst sort of way, making Tony freeze as he tried to fight off the sense memory and just how thoroughly it typically managed to immerse him. That moment of hesitation as he tried to fight his way back to the _Now_ without alerting the others was less than a second in time but still enough for Thanos to send out a blast from the Infinity Gems Gauntlet, tossing Tony ass over tea kettle as he spun through the air, boneless and out of control and at the mercy of several of the Gauntlet’s Gems, radiation flooding his suit and setting off a plethora of alarms.

He landed, out of breath and in pain—but grateful enough to be alive after such a direct hit from Thanos—and perhaps, if Tony hadn’t already been on edge from Steve’s appearance at the peripheral of his vision, he might have immediately questioned _why_ he apparently appeared unharmed. No one had yet sustained a direct hit from the Gauntlet and managed to get up unaided. But… Tony did. Not easily and not steadily: but he got up all the same.

It was the moment that the inventor would remember weeks later, even though—now, at the moment and immersed in the battle ahead—the dark-eyed man just tried his best to shrug off the jitters that still clung to his skin, little spider legs marching up and down his limbs in an echo of distaste and wariness—Tony just powered up the repulsors in the boots and shot back towards the Mad Titan at full capacity.

There was no point in hesitating, not when so much still depended upon him. He couldn’t afford to lose: not now and maybe, perhaps, not ever.

++

Tony’s limbs trembled as he was finally allowed to step out of the Iron Man suit, shaky and lightheaded from too much time inside the armor and not enough breaks between re-entering the melee—it didn’t necessarily matter anymore, not when the battle was finally-- _finally_ \--finished and he was allotted the time to _rest_. Food, shower, and bed seemed like a perfect combination to the engineer right now, and Tony headed towards the elevators with the intent of heading towards the Compound’s communal kitchen to grab whatever was currently on hand to eat before retreating towards his bedroom.

Anything sounded delicious at the moment—hungry enough that even one of DUM-E’s motor oil smoothies sounded appetizing—but the dark-eyed man was confident enough that FRIDAY most likely had ordered from one of the restaurants that had been a staple in the Avengers’ rounds when the team had last been gathered together under one roof. 

“So what do you have waiting for me up top, baby girl?” the engineer asked, unable to hide the exhaustion within his voice—but aware enough, as well, to toss an affectionate smile towards one of FRIDAY’s small sensor cameras. She was still in the rapidly learning stage of her growth, and while JARVIS had seemed to thrive with sarcasm—volleying responses perfectly in time to match Tony’s own quips—his youngest AI responded best to physical signs of approval, coding practically humming in pleasure with each smile her creator tossed her way.

FRIDAY’s lilting Irish voice slowly began to fade out until it was nothing more than empty white static in the background, barely there and unimportant for its non-presence: instead, Tony’s attention was caught by the silvery glint of an overhead light sliding off of the chrome rims on one of his Lotus Elises; the gleam flashed, off and on, steady as a beacon, gesturing a ship to safe harbor—pulsing, one-two one-two one-two, tap-tap-tapping away like a Morse Code operator, reaching out for a counterpart thousands of miles away.

Tony swayed towards that flickering light, pupils expanding to take up the entirety of his iris even as every detail of his workshop sharpened and etched itself within his sight like some bastardized form of HD, imagery hyper-aware to the minute details and colors saturating to their fullest extent. Color and angles and the pulsing of the light off of metal: it enraptured the engineer in the way that nothing else had ever done before, not even when he was buried within his worst science binge.

“—oss?? Boss?! _Boss_!!”

Iron Man’s pilot blinked, motion slow and almost drugged in the gesture’s delay, and Tony steadied himself with a hand against a table’s top, bracing himself before his knees could crumple beneath his weight as vertigo suddenly hit. “…what?” he mumbled, free hand rubbing at a temple as the older man grasped futilely for some sort of foundation. “What happened? FRIDAY?”

Worry was obviously layered in the tone of the AI’s voice as she immediately replied to her creator’s questioning: “You went into a sudden trance-like state,” FRIDAY explained, subdued and concerned. “I attempted to rouse you for an estimated thirteen minutes, but you had no external, quantifiable response to auditory prompting. Boss… should I notify Colonel Rhodes?”

Tony sighed quietly at FRIDAY’s question, hand rising up to tiredly pinch the bridge of his nose between two fingers. He was exhausted, worn down to the dregs by the battle against Thanos—a war that had raged for weeks, a battle whose cost the people of Earth were still counting. The thought of FRIDAY alerting Rhodey to Tony’s exhausted—because that’s all it was—mishap, especially when his best friend was still working on getting used to the newest set of braces that the engineer had created before Thanos’ arrival while _also_ recovering from his own set of back-to-back fights... Tony didn’t want to put that extra burden, that additional concern, on the other man’s shoulders. Not now (not ever, if the inventor was completely honest with himself).

Sighing once more, Tony’s fingers spread out to rub at his eyes, putting pressure on the closed lids and trying to put some pressure to relieve the headache that he could feel forming at the base of his forehead. “…no,” he eventually answered FRIDAY after a pause long enough that would certainly make her concern spike further. “Don’t tell Rhodey, baby girl. It’s been a long day—“ _couple of weeks, certainly, but more along the lines of it being a hellish sort of **year**_ “—and I’ll be right as rain after I get some food and sleep. My platypus deserves his R &R, anyway.”

“Should the phenomenon happen again—“

Before FRIDAY could get started, the engineer cut her off, hand dropping to once again direct a small smile towards his AI’s nearest camera lens. “It won’t,” Tony said in reassurance, soothing away the trepidation that had crept into the normally smooth drawl of his youngest’s voice. “Food, shower, and at least twelve hours of sleep. Everything will be better in the morning. You’ll see.”

The AI made her concern known by not bothering to respond to Tony’s claim, and the engineer figured that dropping that particular thread would be the better part of valor—he was exhausted, regardless of anything else, and one thing that FRIDAY _had_ inherited from JARVIS was her predecessor’s stubbornness. She could be like a dog with a bone and it wasn’t worth the effort of arguing with her about this.

Resigned to the silent treatment that still somehow managed to speak volumes—Tony figured that it was a woman thing, no matter the fact that FRIDAY was made up of millions of lines of code—the billionaire headed up to the Compound’s kitchen area, fully planning on grabbing whatever was leftover from the orders that the AI had put in hours before; Tony had paid for it all, anyway, so he figured that anything he found was fair play.

Before the elevator doors closed completely on him, however, Tony glanced up to meet the amber gaze of a widely smiling coyote, teeth bared in a predatory grin as it sprawled comfortably over the feet of the armor that had somehow managed to survive the fight against Thanos in mostly one piece. There was an eerie sort of _knowing_ in the creature’s gaze--and Tony covered his eyes with a shaky hand to hide away the there-and-gone-again hallucination even as he finally heard the elevator doors slide shut:

 _Food. Shower. Bed_ , the engineer promised himself once more and took a shuddering breath.

+

Tony left the lights on low in the kitchen as he puttered around kitchen appliances and cabinets, gathering together the supplies needed to make a quick meal; leftovers from a multitude of containers were stolen from and piled high onto the inventor’s paper plate—too tired to even want to _think_ about doing the dishes—and it wasn’t long before Tony was leaning against a countertop, watching the timer countdown as the microwave nuked his food.

It was such a tiny little thing—something that Tony wouldn’t have otherwise noticed under normal circumstances—but, as the microwave gave a cheery _beep!_ to signal that his food was done cooking, the dark-eyed man heard a quiet, almost completely muffled _scuff_ , the scrape of the sole of a shoe against the tile of the flooring, from the doorway to the kitchen; the muted sound echoed oddly in the enclosed space of the kitchen, too-loud and not-loud-enough. Tony stiffened at the knowledge that he was no longer alone, instincts rising to the surface in a tidal wave of adrenaline and stress: he twisted around, motion too fast to be considered normal, and his wrist gauntlet revealed itself piece by piece as it covered his hand in an effortless flow of machinery and genius.

The repulsor whined to life as the inventor pointed the gauntlet towards the doorway.

James Buchanan Barnes froze at the sight of the weapon aimed his way, slowly lifting his hands—palms outwards—to show the shorter, dark-eyed man that he was currently unarmed and had no intention of attacking. “Wanted to grab a bottle of water,” the ex-assassin explained, voice sleep-roughened. “Planned to leave when I saw you were already here.”

The world focused to high-definition for Tony: details grayscaled and twilight-kissed, though details sharpened to a blade-fine sight—laser bright and pinpointed enough that the futurist could see the slighter darker flecks of color within the other man’s eyes ( _There’s a bit of green in the blue of your eyes_ , Zemo had once told Steve—memories flashing quicker than thought within the shadowed recesses of Tony’s mind). The details hyperfocused further, minutia standing out stark enough that the engineer could almost count the individual lashes that framed that icy gaze, traced the small tick of a muscle along the arched curve of a cheekbone—micro-expressions standing out loud and clear, vivid and practically _screaming_ in a language that Tony had been trained to read from a very young age—

Their eyes continued to meet, and Tony watched as the pupil within Siberian gray expanded until only the smallest portion of silver remained.

“…Stark,” Bucky said, something like concern tightening the skin at the corners of his eyes, and Tony _blinked_.

“I…” he began, closing his eyes once more even as he gave a shake of his head, trying to jar himself from the weird trance-like state that had overtaken him. Lashes lifting, the inventor caught sight of the stilled form of a coyote from the corner of his gaze; shuddering— _Am I going crazy?_ —Tony gestured towards the fridge even as he stepped forward to ease past the other man’s too-large form. “Sorry. I’m not hungry anymore. It’s all yours, _soldat_.”

“Stark—“

But Tony was already gone.

+

The inventor sat cross-legged on the concrete floor of his workshop, food and shower and bed long ago forgotten: a more pressing concern had taken precedence, readily apparent even as Tony did his best to stare the grinning coyote down. It met his mahogany gaze with its own amber one, jaw dropping down to offer a predatorily mischievous grin.

_Am I going crazy?_

\--the thought that had come to him during his encounter with the Winter Soldier once again curled its edges outwards, brushing against his consciousness and coaxing fear into the forefront of Tony’s mind. And yet: he had fought against alcoholism, against PTSD and depression, had dealt with the manic highs since he was a child and dove headfirst into his first science-spawned rabbit hole. The point was: Tony was well acquainted with _not well_ and this didn’t have any of the hallmarks that would have set off warning bells within his mind (whether or not he’d head those very same alarms… that was another story entirely).

Pressing steepled fingertips against the bow of his lower lip, Tony continued to stare the coyote—the figment of his imagination, his newest hallucinatory experience—down. The longer that both man and beast continued to meet each other’s gazes, the… odder… things became, at least from the inventor’s perspective. 

Gold and amber and bronze: a kaleidoscope of various shades that bled from one hue to another as the details layering the world yet again sharpened and focused into this singular point: rich metallics framed by rust colored fur, and as portions of the world went fuzzy while others became all that he knew, the _ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum_ of a heartbeat reached out and _steadied_ something off-balance within him.

“FRI…?” Tony began—feeling himself speak, hearing the words though it felt like everything was muffled and coming to him from a great distance. “Run some initial brain scans. Track the activity and throw up some diagrams showing comparisons between right now and a week ago.” At his order, the coyote’s grin widened tellingly, teeth bared and pearl-white in the blue-tinged light from the workshop.

“Boss…” FRIDAY said in answer, obviously fretting from the tone of her voice. It was enough to have Tony blinking once more, lifting his gaze away from the creature that had followed him from the kitchen—head turning towards the clear walls that separated his workshop from the rest of the Compound. On the other side, barred from entrance, Bucky stood with arms crossed over the expanse of his chest and with mouth slightly turned downwards as he watched the inventor. The very same concern that had tightened the skin around his eyes settled itself in minute details across his expression—gaze ice-light and constant even as he met Tony’s own dark eyes, and the clockwork _ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum_ of the Winter Soldier’s heartbeat drummed against the shell of the engineer’s ears.

Bucky’s eyes held a sort of _knowing_ , had crept into that winter-pale gaze as they stared each other down in the kitchen, and it was that _knowing_ that set the guarantee for Tony that he wasn’t just going crazy—that something was off, something was _wrong_ , something had changed: and it was something that he needed to _understand_.

(The fact that there was a sort of dawning realization within the other man’s eyes just pissed Tony off—that Bucky had an idea as to what was happening with the inventor, inkling starkly _there_ within those eyes, silver-flecked and _cold_ , and Tony knew that there was something wrong with him—wanted nothing more than to shrug it off and pretend otherwise—but he’d stopped willingly lying to himself years ago.)

“—oss? Boss? _Boss_!”

FRIDAY’s tone gave away the fact that his baby girl had most likely been trying to catch Tony’s attention for quiet some time—lost and zoning, hyperfocused on the inky fan of lashes contrasted against the silvery-blue of Bucky’s eyes (yet more time lost as Tony drowned in the minute details that he had otherwise been blind to— _before_ ). He blinked and turned his head away from his would-be visitor, attention shifting towards the array of windows that FRIDAY brought up after her initial scans.

Image after image of Tony’s brain filled the air of the workshop, and he stared at them one by one, something heavy and ugly settling along the bottom of his stomach as the engineer took in the scans where portions of his brain had begun to light up like a holiday tree: unexpected areas of his brain flaring bright, too bright to be natural, and—ignoring Bucky and the coyote, both who tracked his movements with a quietly predatory nature—shifted to stand and made his way closer.

“What’re you thinking, baby girl?” the engineer asked his youngest AI as he reached out to manipulate the latest scan, last in a long line of images that FRIDAY had paraded for his perusal. It was eerie, seeing the changes laid out in stark contrast from weeks ago to just moments ago—knowing that these changes were being made without his permission, without his original awareness, without his desire to actually go forward and have happen. It was another violation of his body, another type of invasion that paralleled what had happened in Afghanistan years before (where was his autonomy?; did he no longer have a say in _anything_?; when would enough finally be _enough_ , when he’d be able to acknowledge that he was done and lay down in a well-earned _rest_?).

“Well… I believe that I have pinpointed the cause for the various—changes. But I don’t think that you’re going to like what I’ve found, Boss.”

Tentative, FRIDAY began drawing up scans of the Iron Man armor that had gone into battle with Tony—specifically, the suit that had been hit by the blast from the Infinity Gems Gauntlet—as well as any scans run while her creator stood before his work desk, flipping through various files: percentages of increased ability from various organs and the senses they were linked to and the very briefest of genetic scans she was capable of beginning with the instruments FRIDAY currently had access to. The results were—concerning. The suit had been irradiated to such an extent that the particles had managed to seep through the various gashes that the armor had suffered and had soaked into and burrowed deep within Tony’s cells themselves. His DNA had been changing, mutating and shifting from the very moment that the strike had actually hit him, and it was only now that the engineer was finally seeing the effects of that hit for himself.

 _He_ was changing, becoming something… different. Modified. Other.

_Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum._

As the regular thump of James Barnes’ heartbeat once more pressed in against Tony’s ears, the inventor watched as those shifting, mutating portions of his body yet again lit up, sparking to supernova life, and the engineer knew that if he looked heavenward at that very moment, he’d see the dangling threat of Damocles’ Sword swinging to-and-fro over his head. “Blackout protocol, FRI,” Tony quietly ordered—and he knew that the walls behind him went dark and soundproofed by the fact that the images of those starfire-bright points in his body slowly faded away— _ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba…_ —until everything was once again _all systems normal_.

“Time to get to work,” Iron Man’s pilot continued in the silence that was only broken by the cicadan humming of his workshop’s various computers and machines, white noise filling the space with a familiarity that Tony had grown up with but now pressed against him from all sides. It was an effort to focus, the first Herculean task laid out before him—one of many, especially now that Tony had somehow been left floundering and adrift, searching for some sort of foundation that _didn’t_ include the ex-assassin still standing on the other side of darkened walls.

Stark men were forged from iron, after all—

And the only way that Tony knew how to move was _forward_.

+

The zoning was getting worse.

Tony and FRIDAY both dug through files from various agencies—up to and including what had been dumped from both SHIELD and HYDRA—but no result had yet come up as a close enough hit to what was happening to _Tony_ specifically. Time was winding down, the countdown clock ticking away in the background of the inventor’s mind: he was currently on borrowed time, no matter how he didn’t want to acknowledge that particular fact.

(What else was new, though? He’d been on borrowed time when the palladium poisoning began to spread to his entire body, too.)

This was here and this was now, however, and the world was currently comprised of the regular _drip drip drip_ of the coffee strainer filling the pot below, brew a rich chocolate hue—fainter towards the edges of the glass pot, varying shades of burnt sienna as the light from the kitchen window filtered through the caffeinated liquid—and the scent of coffee, fire-burnt and _hot_ , filled Tony’s senses: encompassing, overwhelming, vivid to the extent that the inventor could almost taste the first edge of bitterness upon the tip of his tongue. The rest of the world had whited out, fading away into an incomprehensible fog; all that _was_ narrowed down to sight, hearing, and almost-taste.

_Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum._

“Sentinel and Guide. Those are the terms that you should be looking under, Stark.”

Outside awareness was slow in coming, and it seemed to take forever and a day to withdraw Tony’s focus away from the brewing pot of coffee; the longer that the inventor stared blankly up at Bucky, the smaller his pupils shrunk, shifting away from the expanded pool of limitless darkness that had overtaken their normally mahogany color: terrifying, as well, to see the _visible_ shift from slack unawareness to the flash of brilliancy, of genius, that had first caught Bucky’s attention during a television interview years before, when he’d been on the run from Steve and Sam both.

A slow blink, lashes fanning across the tops of Tony’s tanned cheeks—and _there_ , Bucky saw the almost audible _snap_ of awareness when focus returned and the fog lifted from the older man’s mind. Swallowing, cautious in the same sort of way that a person would approach something that had already burned them—and this being the first time that Bucky had been able to come across the other since Tony had blacked out his workshop—the Winter Soldier repeated himself before continuing on: “Sentinel and Guide. They were… supposed to be a viable alternative for HYDRA to the Super Solider and Winter Soldier programs. Something different, but close enough in other ways. HYDRA created them through experimentation. Radiation in some cases, too.”

Tony gave another slow blink, almost seeming to forcibly reboot portions of his brain that lagged behind the others, dragging them forward from the fog so that, the next time he glanced Bucky’s way, there was a livewire sort of intelligence that flooded his gaze, turning the dark hue of his eyes almost caramel in color: light and rich and _lively_ with a force of personality that Bucky itched to reach out and cup between his hands.

Instead, the younger man remained silent as Tony commented: “FRIDAY and I haven’t come across any mention of Sentinel and Guide in the files we’ve combed through.” Underlying his words was the dare: _Make me believe that you’re not lying._

(But the radiation aspect of creation made… sense. Especially with what had happened with Thanos.)

“You will—eventually. The files were buried pretty deep,” Bucky answered evenly, meeting the dark of Tony’s gaze with the light of his own (skewed, fascinatingly so, how the windows to their souls contrasted so starkly with the souls themselves: light and dark and the opposites of each). “Start looking at the projects that Pierce got involved in.”

The inventor remained silent for a moment longer but, eventually, asked: “Why were they buried? That usually only happens when a project fails and gets discarded.” And why would something get discarded if Tony himself was living proof of a variant type of success? Whether Sentinel or Guide, some change within himself Bucky had been able to recognize and identify.

Emotion flickered within Bucky’s eyes, there and gone again in less than a beat of a heart— _ba-dum_ —and he lifted a shoulder in a slight shrug. “They got buried because they _weren’t_ successes, Stark,” the ex-assassin replied, voice carefully modulated and even. “The Sentinels eventually went crazy. You’re the only one that’s managed to remain—stable.”

From the corner of the kitchen, the coyote that was never far from Tony’s sight tilted its head to the side and offered the engineer a toothy grin.

( _Stable_. …right.)

+

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me:

There was always caution on Tony’s end whenever he was slated for sparring practice with the team members who had sided with “Team Cap” during the media-dubbed _Civil War_. Time didn’t necessarily heal all wounds, and growing up with Howard Stark had taught Tony from a young age to always be on the lookout for the knife intended for his back. So: caution and wariness and brushing up against the edge of violence, razor-bladed and aimed to _hurt_.

It all came to a head when Tony got placed onto the mats with Steve once again; for weeks—months—the engineer had been able to avoid this particular selection (up to and including having FRIDAY play around with the program that generated the selections), but the inevitable always came to call and there was no way to gracefully avoid the session. Not and keep everything as evenly balanced as the futurist had managed to juggle thus far.

Without the Iron Man suit, Tony was slower than a great deal of their team: growing older and surviving various traumas had left their footprint upon his life but, despite those specific disadvantages, things went… unexpectedly. Patterns emerged for Tony to follow, to anticipate, to thread his way around: the quiet inhale of a breath that Steve made before typically striking out in a one-two combination; the tensing of a forearm’s tendon that tended to be paired with a sharp uppercut; the minute shift in stance, weight coming forward onto the ball of a foot, before kicking out. Even the subtle tick along the edge of Steve’s jawline became a micro-expression for Tony to read and interpret and anticipate.

The first time that Tony managed to step off to the side, blocking and shifting the force of Steve’s punch to leave his torso open for strike to the diaphragm, shock rippled through the spar’s observers: silencing conversation as focus shifted to the practice area and team members actually began to _pay attention_.

A flex of the muscle along the thick expanse of Steve’s throat had Tony ducking low to avoid another hit, bracing himself on the soft floor to make a sweep towards his one-time Captain’s legs, intending to tumble him onto the floor. It was a strike that Steve just barely managed to avoid by flipping over the sweep, and the engineer was about to lash out with another counter-attack when—Peter and Harley, voices low and murmuring and yet clear as glass despite the duo walking past in the courtyard outside, conspiring with one another over a potential Spider-man suit upgrade that they wanted to run by Tony himself later on that afternoon.

It was a distraction.  
It shifted Tony’s focus—  
It would demand a toll to be paid from that moment of inattentiveness.

“ _Tony!_ ” Rhodey called out in warning, too far away to be able to intervene: Steve had grown more comfortable, more confident, in Tony’s ability to dodge his hits and strike back with his own, and the attack that was aimed towards the side of the genius’ head held none of the usual restraints that Steve tended to fall back on in most—not all—of his sparring practices.

Horror flickered in the bright blue ( _I’ve never seen any of the green that Zemo claimed was there. How was he able to see something that I’ve never been able to, after all this time?_ ) of the blond’s eyes, and everyone watching could see how he _tried_ to pull back, to shift enough to the side so that the strike wouldn’t connect—but it was like trying to shift the trajectory of a bullet after it’d already been fired from a gun.

Time slowed.

Went molasses-thick.

Seconds stretched into eons.

And the shine of the afternoon sun gleaming off of well-worked vibranium— _ba-dum, ba-dum_ —caught Tony’s gaze, held it, kept it captive as the world flashed in a Morse code language that remained indecipherable to the genius— _ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum_ —and then, suddenly, reality _roared_ to life around Tony, sparking into a delayed sort of awareness— _ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, **ba-dum!**_ —that came paired with the groaning strain of servos and gears put under too much stress, grinding to a halt and jamming but, somehow, managing to stop Steve’s punch before it came close enough to Tony to actually connect.

_Ba-dum! Ba-DUM! BA-DUM! **BA-DUM!**_

Tony lifted his gaze from where metal fingers wrapped themselves tightly around the solid meat of Steve’s fist, stopping it from landing on the futurist—skin and muscle and flesh indented and bleached white from the grip that Bucky maintained to keep his best friend still and away from his opponent: Tony lifted his gaze and met Siberian winter, ice and snow and the creeping touch of frost.

(And where Tony couldn’t ever find the green within Steve’s blue, it was all too easy to spot gunmetal and ash and tarnished silver within that expanse of a midwinter sky.)

“Stark— _are you okay?_ ”

+

“Well, I can safely say that you’ve fucked your arm all to shit,” Tony announced as he continued to poke and prod at the gears that he could visibly see were beyond salvageable; he had no idea of the status of the rest of the components—hadn’t yet progressed far enough to be able to tell—but there was already so much that the engineer knew he’d need to replace.

(It was telling, then, just how much force Steve had put into that punch. And Tony was smart enough to be able to calculate what damage the hit would have done to _him_ if it had actually managed to land. If Bucky hadn’t managed to stop it. If the ex-assassin hadn’t been fast enough. If the arm hadn’t been able to hold. If, if, if: too many possibilities for a future that hadn’t happened, and yet the scenarios still would linger in Tony’s nightmares, joining memories of Siberia and Afghanistan and the star-studded expanse of deep space.)

“It was either my arm or your head. Figured that you’d be able to fix the arm—wasn’t quite as certain ‘bout your head,” Bucky shot back readily enough even as he watched Tony’s careful analysis of the damage done from beneath the inky fan of his lashes. Glacier-tinged grey peeked out from beneath the thick line, and Tony met the other man’s gaze with his own for a long moment before glancing away to return to the arm currently braced upon the workbench between the both of them.

There was no point in giving an answer to that, not when Tony already knew what would have happened—velocity and pounds per inch and angles and math, numbers and logic and clean-cut equations that he’d been immersing himself in from the time he was in _diapers_ —so the inventor just offered a noncommittal sound in response as he twisted one of his electrical disconnector picks and put the smallest bit of pressure on one of the wires that ran the length of Bucky’s arm.

Gears—what remained of them and those still functioning—ticked into movement, and the Winter Soldier’s fingers spread outwards before curling themselves into a tightly held fist. Bucky watched it all with an absent gaze, comfortable enough with his arm’s maintenance by this point that watching the robotics do things that he didn’t tell them to do no longer bothered him to the extent that it had, once upon a time ago. Tony adjusted some of the connecters that still worked and, finger by finger, Bucky’s grip went lax and loose.

“So FRIDAY and I eventually came across the Sentinel and Guide project files,” the engineer commented out of the blue, attention still mostly focused on Bucky’s arm as he began swapping out damaged parts for new ones. The younger man remained silent in turn, waiting patiently for Tony to get to the point of why he was bringing up this particular topic. Bucky didn’t have long to wait: “Nothing that we’ve found has talked about _why_ all of HYDRA’s Sentinels hopped on board the crazy train.”

(A balancing act that Tony still didn’t know if he was actually succeeding at: the coyote that shadowed him—every moment of every day—stood testament to that.)

There was a moment of silence as Bucky gathered his thoughts, cautiously prodded at memories that were oftentimes raw-edged and painful to brush up against, no matter the progress maintained that usage of the BARF system had provided to him. No matter how much healing done and accomplished, some things still just… hurt, would always hurt—it was payment for living a life, for being alive, for being _human_.

Eventually:

“The program only ever produced Sentinels. Their senses were always more—honed—than anyone else’s. Downside was it was too easy to get overwhelmed by them. Zoned out until they died, starving to death, or just went berserk from the information overload. HYDRA wasn’t ever able to produce a Guide to help with that.”

Tony’s tinkering slowed until he was no longer moving. “Guide…? What’s a Guide supposed to do? The files didn’t go into much detail about that, either.”

“Guides were supposed to act as a… grounding… force for a Sentinel. A foundation to set themselves to. A way to lead them out of a zone and to help them focus if necessary but ensure that they never lost way. Guides were supposed to do exactly that: _guide_.”

_Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum._

Bucky’s heartbeat was a steadying presence, always lingering at the edge of Tony’s hearing: there, concrete and stable. A _foundation to set himself to_. The inventor gave a derisive laugh at the dawning realization, bitter and angry that the lighthouse that was supposedly there to _guide him home_ was the very same being that had already taken so much from him ( _Bambino, come sit and play the piano with me._ ). 

Tony took a shuddering breath and brought his free hand up to cover his eyes, temporarily hiding away from reality.

“Of course they fucking were.”

_Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum._

+

“Stark? Stark…? _Tony!_ ”

_It was like being submerged beneath the surface of the water: the world around you muffled and quiet, distant in all the best sorts of ways—allowing you to drift and **be** , nothing more and nothing less. It was peace with an untouchable sort of promise that came paired with the ability to hold your breath for any extended lengths of time. As long as you remained, still and silent, that promise engulfed you and swallowed you whole—_

Tony blinked, awareness returning to his dark eyes even as he met Bucky’s icy own, warmed over with the hint of spring as concern settled within their gunmetal depths. “Tony…?” the Winter Soldier asked once more, words a cacophony of syllables and sounds that came over the too-fast beating of his heart.

_badumbadumbadumbadumbadum_

“I can’t do this alone anymore,” the engineer admitted, voice quiet as he shifted forward just enough to press his forehead against the solid strength of the other man’s collarbone. “I can’t—“

Destruction reigned across the expanse of the battlefield: opponents riddled with bullet and knife wounds as Bucky had cut a swath through the opposition’s forces to get to Tony after Iron Man had abruptly frozen in the middle of the fight, too still and unable to answer any of the rest of the team’s hails. But life and consciousness had returned to Tony’s gaze at Bucky’s repeated calls, and—though the realization was delayed—it still came for the Winter Soldier, as well.

He cupped his hands over Tony’s cheeks, metal thumb tracing over the thin skin just beneath one mahogany eye: gentle in the way that came when he handled precious, breakable things—careful in the intent not to harm, to be kind (not like the Winter Soldier and not like who he used to be as James Buchanan Barnes: but Tony had always been gifted with creating new things and, perhaps, he’d help with forging this grey-eyed man into something better, something _stronger_ just as Bucky would call him out of the white-fogged zone).

“It’s all right,” Bucky answered and turned his head to press a soft kiss to a salt-and-pepper temple, giving in to a temptation that had been lingering in the background of his thoughts for weeks—for months—and something that he’d never thought he’d be able to enact on, not with the distance that had separated them both: history and emotions that stretched out in an insurmountable gulf, too wide—potentially—to cross.

But… maybe. _Perhaps._

(Bucky had been living on hope, on _maybes_ , for longer than he’d ever acknowledge aloud.)

“We’ll be okay. We got this. We can do this, Tony.”

And Tony finally let himself _believe_ , uncurled his fingers away from the hurt—not yet able to let it go, but no longer keeping a death grip on that kernel of encompassing _pain_ —and breathed in the scent of gun oil and sweat even as russet fur from a too-knowing coyote brushed against the back of a hand. Reached towards the water’s surface, breaking through, and shifted closer towards the promise of a cornerstone.

_Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. **Ba-dum.**_

::fin::

**Author's Note:**

> If anyone was curious as to why I picked the coyote as Tony's Sentinel/spirit animal, here is what the coyote is supposed to represent:
> 
> • Trickster  
> • Reluctant Hero  
> • Playfulness  
> • Adjustability  
> • Adaptation  
> • True seeing  
> • Creativity  
> • Paradox  
> • Shape shifting  
> • Wisdom
> 
> I thought it fitting. :)


End file.
